Tag: alt-right

I was only a couple of months into my fieldwork when I met Masa. I had been focusing my attention on innovation and politics within the major Japanese TV networks, but he drew my attention to a different kind of media organization: The Free Press Association of Japan, now defunct. At the time, he identified with its founder, Takashi Uesugi, who had made a name for himself as one of the country’s most prominent crusaders for Japanese journalism reform.
Masa liked anyone who flouted convention, and the mainstream media’s disparagement of Uesugi for not having attended a high-ranked university only served to endear him further to Masa, who himself had not attended college. It was from Masa that I first heard about chemtrails (kemutoreiru) – the notion that the white trails that aircraft leave in their wake represent a chemical form of meteorological or biological manipulation. He began forwarding me articles and links to documentaries exposing Japanese and American government cover-ups. Unemployed, he spent most of his days on the Japanese bulletin board, 2ch (ni chan). He was my first encounter with the Japanese internet alt-right (the netto uyoku), the beginning of an inadvertent deep-dive into one of the most vocal factions in the Japanese internet. (read more...)

In an article published last week on Motherboard, Whitney Phillips, Jessica Beyer, and Gabriella Coleman argue strongly against the widely-circulating idea that that the rise of Donald Trump and his supporters in the alt-right and white nationalist movements can be traced back to early incarnations of the internet-based “trolling” communities such as 4chan. These scholars of trolling culture suggest that a careful historical analysis will show that the recent upsurges in racism, misogyny, and anti-Semitism in our politics are distinct from what their own work treats as the core cultural practice of “trolling.” They argue that 4chan, Anonymous, and trolls in general have never been fully aligned with any single political agenda, and so it is a mistake to reduce the fluid and complex trolling communities of the past to one particularly unlikable segment of what they have become. While I am appreciative of the authors’ insistence on a more precise and causally-nuanced account, I also think we should be careful not to let the pursuit of accuracy distract us from the identification of homologies between these cultural trends. (read more...)